Religion, Race, and Revolution

Creating a Biracial Church at Welsh Neck,South Carolina

John Barrington

Page 71 →The American Revolution raised a fundamental issue that haunted the United States for decades: How could white colonists demand liberty from Great Britain while continuing to profit from the labor of enslaved Black men and women?¹ This contradiction spurred discussion and action that varied from region to region. The New England and mid-Atlantic states ended slavery, immediately or gradually, in the quarter century after independence was won. In the Chesapeake region, the Revolution generated soulsearching laments about the economy’s dependence on slavery and much wishful thinking about the possibility of one day ending the institution. In the Lower South, however, the contradiction between white liberty and Black slavery seemed to have little impact; at the end of the Revolution, white leaders in the Carolinas and Georgia were chiefly concerned with recovering enslaved people who had defected to the British and ensuring that the national government would not block further imports of enslaved people. The logic of liberty had little effect on the conscience of these southernmost states.

There were, of course, exceptions to the general pattern in the Lower South. This article examines one particular South Carolina community—the Baptist Church of Welsh Neck, in the Pee Dee region—where whites did, in the midst of the Revolution, begin to treat their enslaved neighbors differently. The white church members did not become convinced abolitionists, but after ignoring their Black neighbors for decades, the church suddenly in the summer of 1779 invited enslaved Blacks to join, indicating a willingness to accept at least the spiritual equality of the enslaved. About one hundred enslaved men and women took up the invitation, creating over a three-month period a significant Black component to the Welsh Neck Church. The church remained biracial after the war was over and, by the end of the century, contained a slight majority of Black members.

What led the Whites of the Welsh Neck Church to make this sudden adjustment in their racial attitudes? I argue that three factors brought about this change. First, the heady idealism of the Revolution, translated into Page 72 →religious terms, had an impact on the pastor and perhaps on some of the congregation, impelling them to recognize the humanity of the enslaved people living among them. Second, the British invasion of South Carolina sparked security concerns about slave uprisings. The hope that spiritual fellowship would strengthen loyalty may well explain the timing of the whites’ outreach to the Black population. Third, it appears that the enslaved community in the area had reached a point in its acculturation to a white-dominated society, where embracing Protestantism met many of their spiritual and earthly goals. These three factors caused the revolution in this church’s membership and ushered in a new chapter in race relations in Welsh Neck.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, the Welsh Neck Church was a well-established and influential institution whose members included important local political leaders. It was founded in 1738 in what was then a frontier region, just opened up for white settlement.² The Pee Dee Valley offered good agricultural land and easy communications with the densely populated coast, and it was relatively secure from attack by Native Americans. The founders of the Welsh Neck Church were, indeed, of Welsh origin. The oldest members had left Wales for the Delaware Valley early in the eighteenth century.³ The next generation was now looking for new lands in a colony that offered a broad toleration to Dissenters.⁴ The Welsh Neck Church was one of the earliest Baptist churches in South Carolina, and it became a mother church for a cluster of smaller congregations in the Pee Dee region.⁵ During the decades before the Revolution, it was probably the second most influential Baptist church in the colony, yielding in importance only to the church in Charleston. Welsh Neck belonged to the Regular branch of the Baptists, also called Particular Baptists; it adhered to strict Calvinist beliefs, believing that only a small proportion of humanity had been chosen for salvation and requiring all candidates for baptism to relate a personal experience of God’s saving grace.⁶ The church expected high moral standards from its members and regularly suspended or excommunicated those guilty of sinful behaviors, including sex outside marriage, traveling on the Sabbath, dancing, and drinking to excess. During the 1760s and early 1770s, there were between sixty and eighty members of the church. The church admitted new members infrequently, adding perhaps half a dozen new members per year to roughly balance the number who died or left the area. All members of the church were white.⁷

In the summer of 1779, the stable, all-white membership of the church changed suddenly. The pastor, Elhanan Winchester, who had served the church since 1775, began preaching in what he described as “a more open Page 73 →and general” style and sparked a revival. Over just a few months, one hundred thirty-nine new white members joined the church, more than doubling its size. During this same period, Winchester also began to evangelize the Black population of the area. He later published a detailed account of his first outreach to these Black men and women:

About this time I began to find uncommon desires for the conversion and salvation of the poor negroes, who were very numerous in that part of the country; but whom none of my predecessors, that I could learn, had ever taken pains to instruct in the principles of Christianity; … [O]ne evening seeing a great many of them at the door of the house where I was preaching, I found myself constrained, as it were, to go to the door, and tell them, That Jesus Christ loved them, and died for them, as well as for us white people, and that they might come and believe in him, and welcome. And I gave them as warm and pressing an invitation as I could, to comply with the glorious gospel. This short discourse addressed immediately to them, took greater … effect than can well be imagined. There were about thirty from one plantation in the neighborhood present; (besides others)…. From that very evening they began constantly to pray to the Lord, and so continued; and he was found of them. I continued to instruct them, and within three months of the first of June, I baptized more than thirty blacks belonging to that plantation, besides as many others, as in the whole made up one hundred … restoration.⁸

Winchester’s description of his first—and very successful—attempt to evangelize enslaved Blacks formed part of a longer story about his journey from strict Calvinism to Universalist beliefs. Born in 1751 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Winchester was largely self-educated. As one of fifteen siblings, his family’s financial resources were limited. His parents were New Lights, which is to say, they had adopted the “born-again” Christianity of the Great Awakening, which insisted that churches should only include those who had experienced the tangible working of God’s grace in their hearts, indicating that they were chosen for eternal salvation. Winchester underwent this experience in 1769 and became a Baptist. His powerful preaching and knowledge of Scripture earned him a wide reputation in New England, but he was uncompromising in his Calvinist convictions that God had chosen only a small proportion of humanity for eternal bliss and that God’s grace alone distinguished the saved from the damned. He fell out with his first congregation at Rehoboth, MA, because of their increasingly Arminian Page 74 →tendencies—their belief that individuals’ own efforts to follow God’s will could influence their salvation.⁹ Winchester’s reputation for strict Calvinism helped to secure his place as pastor at Welsh Neck in 1775.¹⁰

How did this uncompromising Calvinist become not just an Arminian, believing that people could, to some extent, earn their place in heaven, but a Universalist, convinced that God had decided to save all people? According to Winchester’s own account, his journey to Universalism started in 1778 with a reading of Paul Siegvolck’s Everlasting Gospel. Siegvolck’s argument that God intended to save all of mankind, not just a tiny elect, intrigued but failed to convince Winchester. However, despite Winchester’s intellectual rejection of Siegvolck, he found himself “much stirred up … to adopt [the] more open and general method of preaching” referenced in The Universal Restoration. Winchester pursued this new method “without considering any thing about its consistency with strict calvinism,” following his heart instead of his brain. The success of his new preaching among both whites and Blacks moved him toward a more generous concept of salvation. By the end of the summer of 1779, he was “fully persuaded that the number of the finally saved would equal, if not exceed, the number of the lost.” According to his later account, his outreach to the enslaved—and their enthusiastic response—was both an effect and a catalyst of his theological evolution.¹¹ Winchester traveled back to New England at the end of 1779 to visit family and friends. He intended to return to Welsh Neck, but his journey was delayed, in part by the British invasion of South Carolina and capture of Charleston in 1780. During his northern visit, further reading and reflection pushed him finally to the conclusion that a merciful God would not condemn anyone to hell. Winchester avowed his Universalism at the beginning of 1781 and thereafter became a leading figure in the Universalist movement both in the United States and Great Britain.¹²

Was it a pure coincidence that Winchester’s shift to a less elitist view of salvation happened to coincide with the years of the Revolution? Numerous scholars have made convincing arguments that the Revolution’s political upheaval often went hand-in-hand with democratic tendencies in religious thought and practice. Certainly, Winchester was not the only Calvinist in this period to abandon a narrow concept of the spiritually elect and to embrace Universalism.¹³ It seems probable that the revolution in his ideas about salvation–a revolution that included the enslaved population as fellow children of God–derived from the idealism of the political Revolution that was taking place around him. Winchester’s stress on the emotional, over the intellectual, motivation behind his outreach strongly suggests that the spirit Page 75 →of the era influenced him. Winchester’s involvement in organizing an ecumenical meeting of Dissenting churches at the High Hills of Santee in 1776 provides a specific link between the political revolution and his theological development. With the Particular Baptists taking the lead, this meeting drafted the “Dissenters’ Petition,” which was presented to the South Carolina legislature in 1777, demanding that the special privileges of the Church of England be eliminated in the state’s new constitution. Working toward a joint political statement of this kind with other Protestants whose theology and criteria for church membership differed radically from Welsh Neck’s may have encouraged Winchester’s evolving sense that others outside the Particular Baptist world were part of God’s family.¹⁴

Of course, although Winchester was the prime mover in Welsh Neck’s outreach to the Black community, he could not have changed the church’s racial composition without the consent and support of the white congregation. Because the church “unanimously” renewed its call to Winchester to serve as their pastor at the start of July, after the first baptisms of enslaved Blacks, it seems clear that the congregation espoused his radical new initiative, at least at this early stage. Moreover, enslavers had to consent to the baptism of the enslaved, further suggesting the approval of white congregants. That Winchester found support from his congregation is clear. Less clear is why he found that support. Unlike Winchester, the congregation was not evolving from Calvinism to Universalism. The Welsh Neck Church retained a strict Calvinist creed long after the Revolution. What other factors might have prompted their acceptance of Winchester’s transracial initiative?

There are no written accounts describing the views of any Welsh Neck church member about these first baptisms of local enslaved people, but Winchester’s memoir provides suggestive details. The crucial statement in his story is that thirty or so enslaved people were standing outside the house where Winchester was preaching, on that day when he decided to reach out to them. Those people were enslaved by Colonel Alexander McIntosh, one of the wealthiest members of the Welsh Neck congregation. McIntosh must at least have given his permission for the enslaved to congregate where Winchester was preaching. Very possibly, he had encouraged or ordered them to attend. In fact, it was not the first time they had attended services in this manner. Church records demonstrated that almost a third of the enslaved ultimately baptized by Winchester belonged to McIntosh, who must, therefore, have been fully in agreement with the pastor in the decision to extend Christianity to the Black community. It may be that McIntosh, like other Americans at this time, was persuaded by the Revolution’s rhetoric Page 76 →of freedom to look at his human possessions somewhat differently and to decide that their souls were worth saving. However, there was another possible motive behind his cooperation at this particular moment. At the end of 1778, the British had occupied Savannah, just over the South Carolina border. They used Savannah as a base to make forays into Lowcountry South Carolina throughout 1779, even briefly laying siege to Charleston.¹⁵ During those expeditions, they invited enslaved men and women to join the British cause in return for freedom. This invitation was in accordance with the Philipsburg Proclamation issued in that year by General Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief of British forces in America, who made the freeing of enslaved people a general and permanent policy, rather than an ad hoc military tactic. By the end of the Revolution, thousands of enslaved people had accepted the call. In the summer of 1779, when Winchester’s outreach to the Black population took place, Welsh Neck enslavers must have realized they could no longer take the enslaved’s submission for granted.¹⁶ There was some discussion among South Carolina’s leaders of competing with the British for the loyalty of the enslaved by offering them freedom in return for military service, an idea urged by John Laurens, son of prominent planter–merchant Henry.¹⁷ Most of the elite in South Carolina, however, were strongly opposed to the idea, and nothing came of it.¹⁸ Still, the state’s leaders recognized the need to counteract British inroads among the enslaved. McIntosh was not in the upper echelons of South Carolina’s elite, but he was in its outer circles, rising rapidly through the officer ranks in the state’s militia.¹⁹ Courting the enslaved’s loyalty by making them brothers and sisters in Christ was perhaps an alternative strategy for averting the mass defections that were occurring at that precise moment in South Carolina’s Lowcountry.²⁰ Baptizing enslaved people for reasons of security was cynical, but it is possible that the pressures of war were mingled with more complex changes in attitudes: Perhaps McIntosh and other enslavers were more easily able to realize that there was a contradiction between their own fight for liberty and their willingness to hold others in bondage, now that enslaved people were potential collaborators with advancing British armies. The enslaved had become decisionmaking human beings, agents of change, instead of passive chattel.

Whatever the precise mixture of motives that impelled the Welsh Neck congregation to support their minister’s evangelization of enslaved people, their efforts would have been in vain had it not been for the readiness of the enslaved converts to accept Christianity. While enslavers could compel their victims to act against their wills, Protestantism placed a great emphasis on the internal faith of the individual believer; conversion was not a simple Page 77 →matter of accepting baptism and submitting to the authority of the Church.²¹ Of all Protestant denominations, strict Calvinists, like those of the Welsh Neck Church, were particularly concerned to ensure that all who were baptized not only be willing but also that they could demonstrate clear evidence of God’s work on their hearts. A single insincere convert could pollute the purity of the congregation. A central preoccupation of church leaders, as recorded throughout the Welsh Neck Church Book, was to suspend or expel any members whose words or actions indicated that they were not among the spiritually elect. Winchester’s criteria for what constituted strong evidence of divine election were perhaps becoming laxer than those of other Church members by 1779, but even so the enslaved people who came forward for baptism must have been willing agents to a significant extent, even if they were experiencing pressures of various kinds from their enslavers.

Winchester’s account does emphasize the extraordinary willingness of that first group of Blacks he addressed to accept his invitation. After he had spoken with them, “these returned home, and did not even give sleep to their eyes, as they afterwards informed me, until they had settled every quarrel among themselves, and … had married every man to the woman with whom he lived; had restored whatever one had unjustly taken from another; and determined from that time to seek the Lord diligently.”²² Winchester’s description of the slaves’ reaction to his address suggests two points. First, they seemed already to know what would be required of them if they were to convert to Christianity. Winchester had delivered only a “short discourse” extending a welcome to the Christian faith, yet his audience immediately made some extensive and significant changes to their lives to qualify for baptism. As powerful and inviting as Winchester’s preaching might have been, taking such momentous steps strongly suggests that these enslaved converts had been exposed to Christianity before and knew some of what the faith required, certainly in terms of marriage.²³ The most likely source of this knowledge would have been Baptist preachers of the Separate denomination who had been operating in South Carolina for over a decade. The Separate Baptists had emerged in Virginia during the later part of the Great Awakening and then moved south through the Piedmont of North Carolina into South Carolina during the 1750s and 1760s. The Separates, unlike the Regular or Particular Baptists of Welsh Neck, were not strict Calvinists, and they evangelized broadly, reaching out to poor whites and Blacks alike. Those enslaved by Macintosh may have learned about Christianity either directly from a traveling Separate preacher, or indirectly from other Blacks on the Separates’ circuit. Whatever the source of the information, Page 78 →it seems clear that the slaves Winchester addressed on June 1, 1779, knew something about the white community’s faith and perhaps had already discussed the idea of conversion. Their readiness to convert indicates that they had reached a particular point in the general process whereby the enslaved acculturated to their new American environment. People who had recently arrived from Africa were generally unreceptive to evangelical overtures, as earlier efforts in Lowcountry South Carolina had demonstrated.²⁴ Lack of English-language skills and strong attachments to African traditions were barriers to conversion. However, Africans who had lived in America for some years and their children who were born here were far more likely to understand white ways and were more willing to conform to them. It seems likely that the Black men and women who accepted Winchester’s invitation so quickly had reached this stage in the acculturation process.²⁵

The second point that can be gleaned from Winchester’s memoir is that the enslaved individuals he addressed acted very much as a group. These Black men and women lived on the McIntosh plantation, and their joint action suggests a phenomenon seen widely in British America: Africans who lived on large plantations often recreated the kin and community groups they had been forced to leave behind by turning other enslaved people on the plantation into a surrogate clan. Those on smaller farms near the large plantations often attached themselves to the group identity of the larger enslaved community.²⁶ If McIntosh’s slaves had, indeed, formed a surrogate kin group of this kind, then acceptance of a Christian identity would have been a group decision, rather than an act by multiple individuals. The first converts to join Welsh Neck, on June 27, 1779, were named Mingo, Plato, Stephen, Darion, and Leannah, all but the first enslaved by McIntosh.²⁷ It is very possible that one or more of these initial converts were recognized as community leaders on the McIntosh plantation, although there is no certainty that such was the case. Winchester’s memoir and other relevant sources provide scant details about the internal social structure or culture of the Pee Dee plantations. However, the African sense of community, adapted to the plantation environment, seems visible in the documents, and it provided the momentum for the large numbers of conversions over a short period of time.

Winchester, in his account of the conversions, makes no mention of his new congregants’ previous religious beliefs. As far as he was concerned, those beliefs belonged to the broad category of “heathenism,” and the converts were simply leaving those errors behind. However, it is highly likely, given common patterns of slave conversions across the British colonies, that the new converts accepted membership in the Welsh Neck Church Page 79 →because they saw similarities between its practices and their own traditions. When brought to America, enslaved Africans did not abandon the faiths and cultures of their homelands, and those faiths varied.²⁸ A minority of the enslaved in South Carolina had been Muslim or Catholic, but most had subscribed to one of the many local, animist faiths of sub-Saharan Africa.²⁹ These faiths differed in many details but shared certain important features that enslaved Africans could recognize in Christianity. Among the Protestant denominations of British America, the evangelical sects and the Baptists were the groups that generally looked most familiar to them.

One important point of familiarity was the nature of evangelical gatherings for worship. As mentioned previously, the enslaved workers on the McIntosh plantation who responded enthusiastically to Winchester’s preaching had probably already encountered traveling evangelical preachers who belonged to the Separate Baptists. These preachers often addressed crowds out of doors to reach communities far from churches. They were willing to preach to anyone, be they enslaved Blacks or impoverished whites. Because oral methods of propagating the faith took precedence over study of the Bible or other texts, evangelicalism could be highly effective at reaching people who were nonliterate or semiliterate.³⁰ Preaching was theatrical and emotional; listeners responded with groans, fainting fits, and even deathlike loss of consciousness. People who recalled African religious practice or who had experienced versions of it in the American colonies would find much that they recognized. African worship in animist communities often involved spiritual possession, trances, and enactments of death and rebirth.³¹ None of these Separate Baptists settled in the Welsh Neck region to create a permanent congregation. However, when Winchester changed his preaching style, any local enslaved people who had previously been attracted to Christianity through evangelical preaching could now connect with a local church in which they could seek membership.

In contrast to open-air meetings for proselytizing, normal Sunday worship at Welsh Neck was less emotional.³² Still, Black men and women who decided to join Welsh Neck would find much that was familiar. First, joining the Church involved baptism by total immersion of the convert in a natural body of water, such as a river, a practice common in many African religions.³³ After baptism, new converts would have found themselves in a community that believed fervently in the miraculous. Many white Protestants, especially the wealthier and more educated, were influenced by the Enlightenment, which tended to deny or downplay God’s intervention in a world dominated by predictable, measurable, mechanical forces. Welsh Page 80 →Neck congregants, by contrast, still believed that the supernatural pervaded the earthly sphere. For example, Philip James, one of Winchester’s predecessors as pastor at the church, had collapsed while mourning his recently deceased child. He was taken for dead, and his body was laid out next to the corpse of his offspring to be prepared for funeral rites. Suddenly, he awoke and told those gathered that his soul had left his body and journeyed toward heaven. There, a company of angels showed him his child’s soul, happy in the afterlife, before bidding him return, for now, to his earthly frame.³⁴ Such stories of direct contact between ordinary human beings and supernatural powers would have been greeted with skepticism by many of the Charleston elite, brought up in the Church of England. The enslaved members of Welsh Neck, however, would have accepted the interaction of the spiritual and earthly spheres without difficulty, since such experiences were central to many African religions.

Many Black converts would have recognized other practices at Welsh Neck as well. It is important to recall that even Winchester, despite his more passionate preaching, had not abandoned his Calvinist beliefs when he first reached out to the Blacks gathered at the door. Certainly, the rest of his congregation remained firmly convinced that God had saved a tiny segment of the human population. The Welsh Neck congregation, therefore, paid close attention to signs that each member of its congregation had truly been chosen. This practice would also have been familiar to the enslaved converts. African communities commonly watched over the behavior of their members lest any of them break taboos that kept the whole group safe. Those who failed to keep to the rules were admonished, and repeat or serious offenders were expelled, just as happened at Welsh Neck.³⁵ Such careful sifting of the chosen from the damned would not have been a practice among the Separate Baptists, whose congregations were far less carefully defined. Winchester’s “open” preaching, coupled with Welsh Neck’s strict Calvinist theology, combined an accessible welcome to the enslaved with membership in a tight, spiritually privileged group.

Overall, the transformation of the Welsh Neck Church into a biracial community during the American Revolution resulted from a concatenation of circumstances. The logic of liberty—that white demands for rights should lead to recognition of enslaved people’s humanity—seems to have been in play. However, without the military emergency created by the British invasion and the readiness of the Black community to convert in large numbers, the idealistic impulses of the Revolution would have been unlikely to have had so striking an effect.

Page 81 →The inclusion of Black members in 1779 was not a mere flash in the pan but had a long-term impact on Welsh Neck and other congregations in South Carolina. After the momentous events of that summer of 1779, Winchester took an extended leave of absence and never returned.³⁶ Soon after he left, the British occupied Charleston, and South Carolina descended into civil war. With the return of stability in 1782, Welsh Neck had to reorganize.³⁷ Welsh Neck remained a biracial church, even after the new pastor, Edmund Botsford, examined and rejected many of Winchester’s converts, white as well as Black, whom the congregation felt had been admitted too hastily. Over the years, Botsford continued to add new enslaved Black as well as white converts. By the time Botsford left Welsh Neck for Georgetown in 1796, Blacks were a slight majority in the church. The biracial community thus survived the particular wartime circumstances that had created it.

Furthermore, Welsh Neck’s inclusion of Black members had an impact beyond its local area. During the war, the Regular Baptist congregation in Charleston had been scattered. When peace returned, Botsford played a leading role in reconstituting the Charleston church. He included new Black members as well as former white members.³⁸ The change in race relations wrought by the Revolution at Welsh Neck thus spread to the most important Baptist church in South Carolina. The Welsh Neck and Charleston churches went on to influence beliefs and practices throughout the state, thanks to their prominent roles in the Charleston Association, a body with persuasive authority over many individual congregations.³⁹

Of course, enslaved church members remained enslaved. In most essentials, the condition of the Black population had not changed even after admission to Welsh Neck or other Baptist churches. Had whites at Welsh Neck altered their views of the enslaved in any significant way? The whites’ acceptance of certain Blacks’ spiritual equality is worth emphasizing. Welsh Neck and the other Regular Baptist congregations with which it was associated continued to adhere to a very restricted, traditionally Calvinist view of salvation.⁴⁰ The inclusion of African and African-American members was, therefore, particularly significant, more so than in the case of evangelical sects in the South that had incorporated Black members between the 1760s and the end of the century. Evangelicals like the Separate Baptists and Methodists, who were avowedly or at least de facto Arminians, offered a salvation to Blacks that was widely on offer to all humans. The Calvinists of Welsh Neck and the Charleston Association offered their Black neighbors a very restricted privilege that elevated them, in spiritual terms, above the majority of the white community, who, they believed, were condemned to eternal Page 82 →torment. Inclusion among the spiritually elect might seem small compensation, given the continuation of slavery and all of its abuses, but to the members of these Regular Baptist congregations, there was no greater privilege than election to eternal life.

With regard to this world, there are some indications that Black membership in Welsh Neck impelled white owners to treat enslaved people more humanely. The revision to the Welsh Neck Church Covenant in 1785 imposed, for the first time, assorted duties on enslaving church members:

We promise that if we should be possessed of negro or other slaves, that we will act a truly christian part by them; by giving them good advice, laying our commands on them to attend the worship of God in public on Lord’s days & in private in our families when convenient & we also promise, that we will not treat them with cruelty, nor prevent their obtaining religious knowledge, & will endeavour to prevent their rambling: and will encourage those who can read, at proper times to instruct others; & in all things endeavour to act in our families, as to obtain the blessing of God.⁴¹

The commands in this covenant to act a “christian part” toward the enslaved, to provide them with what white members felt to be constructive guidance, and to abstain from what the white community regarded as “cruelty” represented an important extension of the Church’s moral regulation into the private affairs of its white congregation. At no point before the Revolution had Church members been chastised for ill treatment of the enslaved. Among the practices entailed in the 1785 covenant, teaching enslaved people to read was an unusual, even daring, act, as was encouraging the enslaved to instruct others in their community, a practice consistent with allowing Black preaching on the plantations. A limited recognition of Black leadership in spreading God’s word was thus embedded in this new covenant. Although the overall picture of race relations in this document is one of white paternalism, there was an improved recognition of Black humanity and agency. It is important to note that the commands laid on whites in this covenant not only affected those Black men and women who became full members of the Church, but also the wider group of people enslaved by Welsh Neck members.

The Baptist Register provides an interesting insight into the relationship between religion and race among Welsh Neck congregants after the Revolution. Reverend Botsford and others at Welsh Neck during the 1790s eagerly sought this biannual publication, compiled by the Reverend John Rippon of the Carter Lane Baptist church in London. The Register was relatively Page 83 →expensive: After trans-Atlantic postage, it cost five shillings an issue, yet leading members of Welsh Neck purchased three dozen subscriptions, even as they eschewed other books and published sermons.⁴² The Register provided a forum where Baptists across the world could share information about the progress of the denomination and the exemplary lives of some of its practitioners. Articles came from Britain, Ireland, the United States, the British Caribbean, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Poland, Prussia, Russia, India, and Sierra Leone. Botsford contributed news items about Welsh Neck and other churches in South Carolina. The Welsh Neck readers of those three dozen subscriptions were able to envisage their backwoods church in the Pee Dee district as part of a vibrant, global “imagined community” of Baptists who were spreading the faith to ever-growing numbers.⁴³

This global community was multiracial, with Black members sometimes holding leadership roles. The Register featured stories about Black pastors who were enjoying success in several places, such as Georgia, Nova Scotia, and Jamaica. These stories not only showed Blacks working alongside whites to spread God’s word but presented these figures as complex individuals whose life stories invited an empathetic understanding of what it was like to be enslaved. For example, George Liele, who had been born into slavery in Virginia and then sold to an enslaver in Georgia, had experienced a deep sense of his sinfulness as a young man and became convinced that he was bound for hell after hearing the preaching of a Reverend Matthew Moore. An inpouring of God’s grace to his heart then demonstrated that he was among the Chosen, and he was formally received into the Baptist faith. During the Revolutionary War, he was enslaved by a Loyalist, Henry Sharp, a deacon at the Reverend Moore’s church. Sharp freed him before the British evacuation of Savannah, but Liele did not leave with the British and had to prove that he had been freed. Fortunately, he had the right documents and succeeded in avoiding re-enslavement. He then worked for two years as an indentured servant to earn freedom for his family. As a free man, he began preaching to the enslaved people on his plantation, using singing as an effective means of evangelization. He so impressed local Baptist leaders that he was sent to preach at other plantations and even addressed the white congregation on occasion. Liele and his family (at the time of publication of the article in the Register, he had a wife, three sons, and a daughter) then emigrated to Jamaica. There, he founded his own church and, after overcoming the hostility of the local white community, managed to convert about four hundred fifty people, including some whites, as part of a larger effort to spread the Baptist faith on the island. Like many born into slavery, Liele had Page 84 →no precise sense of his age but believed that he was around forty at the time he founded his ministry.⁴⁴ Stories like Liele’s humanized enslaved Blacks and presented them to Welsh Neck readers as anything but passive chattel.

In addition to individual biographies of this kind, readers of the Register at Welsh Neck encountered a range of opinions about the compatibility of slavery and Baptist Christianity. Letters from Baptists in London and some of the northern states were openly critical of both the slave trade and slavery. For example, minutes of the Shaftesbury, NY, Baptist Association included an exhortation to prayer “for that auspicious day, when the Ethiopian, with all the human race, shall enjoy all that liberty due to every good citizen of the commonwealth; and the name of Slave be extirpated from the earth.”⁴⁵ One of the Reverend Botsford’s own contributions to the Register struck a different note, celebrating the fact that the “owners [of enslaved converts] begin to discover that their slaves are of increasing value to them when they become religious” though Botsford also went on to praise Virginia planter Robert Carter for freeing his enslaved people, stressing that Carter did so after leaving the Church of England for the Baptists. Rippon, the Register’s editor, added a statement from Carter that “the toleration of slavery indicates very great depravity of mind.”⁴⁶ Although the Register’s contents were not unambiguously abolitionist, certainly Welsh Neck readers would have encountered regular antislavery statements in its pages.

Neither their reading of the Register nor the new church covenant, nor the fact that whites and Blacks worshiped in the same building meant that the white members of Welsh Neck had become ardent abolitionists or that they believed in racial equality. Black members of the church sat in a separate wing during services. The church covenant’s exhortation to behave humanely only discouraged, but did not forbid, breaking up enslaved families by selling individuals far from home. At their best, whites’ attitudes toward Black church members were patronizing. However, these limitations, serious as they were, should not obscure the fact that the Revolutionary War period had witnessed a significant improvement in the way that the whites of Welsh Neck looked at the Blacks in their community. Although that improvement stalled and then lost ground during the early nineteenth century, the Welsh Neck story should remind us that there were multiple possibilities in the development of race relations and that even the Lower South was not entirely immune from the logic of liberty unleashed by the Revolution.

Page 85 →John Barrington was born in New York City but grew up largely in Great Britain. He has been teaching at Furman University for close to thirty years. His focus is on the American Revolution, especially on its religious and trans-Atlantic aspects.